The Last Clean Lap: A High-Stakes Racing Romantic Suspense Thriller of Sabotage, Forced Proximity, and a Dangerous Comeback
Paperback
Series: The Blackline Files, Book 1
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 29 2026
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.02
Height: 0.96 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Two years after a crash destroyed her wrist, her reputation, and nearly her career, Sloane Calder is finally back behind the wheel. The world remembers a reckless driver who chose the wall. Sloane remembers the thirty-six people she saved by hitting it.
Then, on the eve of her comeback, an authenticated safety file arrives with a map of her death.
Turn Thirteen. Lap Nineteen. Tomorrow.
Elias Rook recognizes the system immediately. He helped build ORACLE, a predictive engine trained on years of Sloane's childhood telemetry-data collected before she was old enough to understand what anyone planned to do with it. Now someone has turned that machine into a weapon capable of studying her choices, manipulating her car, and making money from the future it intends to create.
When a seventeen-millisecond brake delay nearly sends Sloane's teammate into a barrier, the forecast stops looking like a threat and starts looking like rehearsal. With Blackline investigators closing the circuit around them, Sloane and Elias are forced through locked garages, secured evidence rooms, hostile press conferences, and safehouses with separate bedrooms that do nothing to cool their chemistry.
But the closer Elias gets to protecting her, the more he risks becoming another man who believes knowing Sloane gives him the right to decide for her. And the closer Sloane gets to the championship, the more the attacker learns exactly what she will sacrifice to keep racing.
To survive the final lap, Sloane must defeat a machine trained to know her better than she knows herself-and trust a man who must learn that loving her means never owning the next choice.
The Last Clean Lap is an adult, dual-POV motorsport romantic suspense novel featuring a brilliant Black race-car driver, a guilt-ridden technology architect, forced proximity, sharp banter, corporate conspiracy, high-speed sabotage, disability and injury recovery, open-door heat, and a complete central romance with a happy ending.
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